Hey i’m doing some projectiles glow in the dark with an emmisive color, but the character who shoots the projectiles shoot a TON of them.
However i dont want theses projectile to light the environement around them, it creates a lot of issues and its just really ugly because i want theses projectile to be really glowy.
I’ve read online that its unfortunately not possible to de-activate lumen only on specific objects.
However, i still need some lights and neons emissive materials to cast light on walls with lumen in my level.
The solution i found is to set the projectile material to “Transluscent” but with zero mask, so full opacity.
That way i keep the Emissive very high to a good Glow effect but i dont cast any lights on the environement.
But i know Transluscent materials cost a lot more, but is that cost only related to transparency ?
an unlit translucent polygon does not add alot of shading cost. traditionally it is rendered after all the opaque stuff and causing basicly overdraw, which is considered cost or “waste” of per pixel computation.
or… in case you enabled it… translucent objects are rendered into a seperate buffer and composited into the scene at a later stage. which adds the compositing computation as “cost”.
i dunno, tbh. hard to estimate. pretty sure your hardware is different then mine. just try it and see how much it impacts performance. and do a test with the other render option. compare it. you gotta develop and test it, ig.